Beginning MDS - Creating Attributes (Part 4 of 7)

Attributes are defined within entities. An attribute contains values that help to describe the member they’re related to. For example our ProductName leaf entity within a Product model could have a freeform attribute defined to hold each item's Standard Cost or Weight. Attributes can also reference members of other entities defined within the same model. By referencing members in other entities we can maintain a master list of say Colors (in the Color entity) and then relate members of the product entity to the color entity, very much like a foreign key relationship (in fact, it is a foreign key relationship)

Walkthrough

In this walkthrough we're going to create attributes on the City, StateProvince and CountryRegion entities within the Geography model.

Attributes are defined and maintained within entities, so on the Master Data Manager page select System Administration to administer the entities we created in the previous post.

In the Model Explorer page select Manage > Entities.

In the Entity Maintenance page ensure Geography is selected in the Model dropdown. Click the City entity to select it and note the toolbar buttons become visible. Click the pencil icon to edit the properties of the City entity.

In the Edit Entity: City screen in the Leaf Attributes section click the + sign to add a new attribute underneath the default Name and Code attributes that already exist by default.

In the Entity: City Add Attribute screen, select the Domain-based radio button, type StateProvince in the Name textbox and select StateProvince in the Entity dropdown. In the MDS repository DB this will create a physical foreign key constraint between the City and StateProvince entities. Click the save button when done. Click save again to save and exit the City entity maintenance screen.

Using the same steps as above create a domain-based attribute on the StateProvince entity with the name CountryRegion referring to CountryRegion entity. Click save and then save again to exit the StateProvince entity maintenance screen.

Now we'll add two attributes to the CountryRegion entity using the Free-form option, one for FrenchCountryRegionName and one for SpanishCountryRegionName. Use the same steps as before to create these two attributes.

Name: FrenchCountryRegionName, DataType: Text, Length: 100

Name: SpanishCountryRegionName, DataType: Text, Length: 100

After adding the FrenchCountryRegionName and SpanishCountryRegionName leaf attributes your CountryRegion entity should now look like the shot below.

Let's have a look at what we've got so far. Click on the Explorer link in the top left of the screen and click the Geography model to display the model and its entities on the right-hand side of the screen. 

On to Loading Members & Attributes